Why Don’t You Post The Funny Anymore?
Back in 2000, during my second senior year, I got a research grant to make a student film. The proposed film was far from typical; It was going to be stop motion animated, but use custom written software to superimpose lips and mouths onto the characters. The idea of this wasn’t outrageous. The previous year I had worked with Marshall Miller on his student stop motion film. Marshall is someone who has truly studied character animation, and his enthusiasm for the topic was contagious. My contribution was software that let him compare his frames as he shot, and allowed him to build previews on set.
(Sadly, all I have is this low resolution version. Watch the quality of the character movements, and then realize he got that out of regular artist mannequins).
The next year I was experimenting in lip-sync for undergraduate animation, and I used the grant as a way to expand the research. Marshall and I spent all summer at Oldfather Studios working on a stop motion version of “The Emperor’s New Clothes”, subsisting mostly on peanut butter sandwiches. My mother had made the costumes, and his mom had made the sets, Marshall was lead animator, Niki Newland was our cinematographer, and I was director, software designer, and animation assistant. My professor at one point exclaimed “It’s like a modern version of let’s put on a show!”
After that year I graduated and moved to Dallas. The animation bug wasn’t dead, but I certainly didn’t have the spare time to engage it. Five years later, when I bought a house, I finally had the space to really try again, but doing an animated short really didn’t interest me. The problem is that you build up a number of sets, characters, and costumes, spend months or years shooting minutes of footage, and then throw it all away when you’re finished. What I had really wanted to do was make an independent animated series. First, you can re-use the sets, costumes, and characters week after week. Second,when you work on a short you have to finish the entire thing, but on a series you get small rewards by having new episodes.
While I was thinking about this, my high school friend Cory Q contacted me looking to collaborate on something. He and his friend Seth had a website monkeyrivertown.com, and they wanted to do something for their site. Cory’s thought was that there should be a professor monkey who talks about random things, like their Ask The Philosotron. This was a little too open ended for me. Cory is very Liberal Arts, with knowledge about history and culture, but the only two things I know about are computers and movies. The solution was to narrow the focus down to writing about movies, and with that the Movie Monkey was born.
Writing episodes usually would involve having a random thought in the middle of a conversation and thinking “I should write an episode around that.” Anyone who follows my twitter feed probably knows I have a lot of random thoughts in a given week. I would bunch up about 6 episodes at a time and then record them with Cory Q and my friends. Of the entire process, recording was the most rewarding. While the script had the structure, Cory, Jason, Chris, Parvenah would make it funny. My scripts were never considered fully baked, and everyone brought ideas to the table to make it funnier (for example, in the original script Steve Jobs was a hippie. Cory changed it in delivery). I got to record my friends hanging out and having fun. What could be better?
I would shoot episodes in the mini-studio in my house. The set and the monkey itself was built by Brendan Lattin, who was a KU student at the time. All of those books in the Movie Monkey’s bookshelf? Hand bound by Brendan. The guy is good. The costumes were made by my mom, and once again she did an amazing job. After her experience on The Emperor’s New Clothes, she’d learned how to design costumes specific to stop motion. If the audio was cut together I could animate an episode across the span of two weekends if I did nothing but animate.
Probably the biggest accomplishment was the Movie Monkey Evil League of Evil entry. Like the rest of the internet, I loved Dr. Horrible’s Sing Along Blog and when I heard about the YouTube contest I knew we had to enter. The original idea was to turn the Movie Monkey into The Funky Monkey, a disco super-villain. I didn’t have time to make Bootsy Collin’s glasses or a costume, or music, or anything else necessary to pull it off. The idea also didn’t fit with the meta-humor of the Movie Monkey, who tends to talk about why things are. Three days before the deadline I had a new idea: rather than focus on making a superhero, make a video about failing to make a superhero. I wrote the original lyrics to the song while in a three hour conference call at work. Brian Campbell wrote the music (and made the lyrics work) and Brian Hindman lent his voice.
Which brings us to the central question – why don’t I post the funny anymore? There are a number of reasons.
I have a disadvantage to most independent filmmakers in that I like my office job, and not just because my boss might be reading. When you have a time consuming creative endeavor, it helps to do it out of hatred of your soul crushing job, especially if you can see it as an eventual escape. Sadly, I like what I do, and surprisingly I don’t suck at it or at least I hope I don’t.
What I do suck at is promotion. Getting a series off the ground involves getting people to watch, which is all the harder when you don’t have a major network or company behind you. It doesn’t help when you pick a main character name Google thinks is a misspelling. I tried forcing my friends to watch by emailing, pestering, and otherwise being a Amway salesman with my friends, but I couldn’t get people to watch.
There is one video I made that was popular.
The reason it’s popular isn’t because it’s very good; it’s just because it’s about Transformers. Movie Monkey episodes can takes weeks to make, and I’m lucky if one of them gets over 1000 views. It took me one evening to write, animate, and put that up after seeing the Transformers movie, and it’s currently sitting at 20,000 views. If I wanted viewers, I could litter Movie Monkey episodes with Transformer, video game, and movie references (it is named the Movie Monkey after all). That isn’t the series I wanted to make though. Sadly, no one wanted to watch the one I was making.
The final problem was that I’m not a very good animator. My best work aspires to reach the heights of Hannah-Barbera cartoons, which is like saying I aspire to paint by numbers. You can actually see the quality of the Movie Monkey’s animation degrade as the series progress: in the first episode, the Movie Monkey shakes and scratches his butt as he talks, but by the end I was happy to just put in head movements.
When you’re your own studio only you have the power to cancel yourself, and I think it’s time to cancel the Movie Monkey. He had a good run, said the things I wanted to say, and was a blast to work on. Does this mean I’m a quitter? Maybe, maybe not. One of the problems I had with animation is that it competed for my free time with athletics. It’s hard to train for sporting events when you have to spend your weekends locked away. The most popular entries on nicreations.com have always been the fitnick posts, so I’ve decided to spin that off into it’s own blog. I’ve picked up some new video equipment in order to record sporting events, and I hope to make interesting and exciting posts.
That’s the deal. I’ll still post nerdy things to this site (and possibly some animation), so don’t remove it from RSS just yet. If you like fitness posts, follow the new fitnick blog. I also recommend Monkeyrivertown for a good site to read. Finally, I’d like to thank my Mom, Brendan, Cory Q, Jason, Chris, Parvenah, Marshall, and everyone else who helped with the Movie Monkey. You guys made it work – I just edited.
It’s been great fun. Good night!